The Human A Priori is a collection of essays by A.W. Moore, one of them previously unpublished and the rest all revised. These essays are all concerned, more or less directly, with something ineliminably anthropocentric in our systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making. Part I deals with the nature, scope, and limits of a priori sense-making in general. Parts II, III, and IV deal with what are often thought to be the three great exemplars of the systematic pursuit of such sense-making: philosophy in the case of Part II, ethics in the case of Part III, and mathematics in the case of Part IV.
Much of the attention throughout is devoted to the work of other philosophers: Kant and Wittgenstein feature prominently, and five of the essays take the form of reviews or critical notices of recent work in philosophy.
But the interest in never purely exegetical. One of the lessons that emerges from the essays, either in opposition to the views of these other philosophers or by invocation of their views, is that we humans achieve nothing of real significance in philosophy, ethics, or mathematics except from a human point of view, and hence that all three of these pursuits can be said to betoken what may reasonably be called 'the human a priori'.
"Preface Introduction Part I. The Nature, Scope, and Limits of A Priori Sense-Making 1: Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections 2: The Necessity of the Categories', written jointly with Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson 3: What Descartes Ought to Have Thought About Modality' 4: Varieties of Sense-Making Part II. How We Make Sense in Philosophy 5: Sense-Making From a Human Point of View 6: Not to be Taken at Face Value 7: Carving at The Joints 8: The Concern With Truth, Sense, et al.-Androcentric or Anthropocentric? Part III. How We Make Sense in Ethics 9: A Kantian View of Moral Luck 10: On There Being Nothing Else to Think, or Want, or Do 11: Conative Transcendental Arguments and the Question Whether There Can Be External Reasons 12: Maxims and Thick Ethical Concepts 13: Quasi-Realism and Relativism 14: From a Point of View 15: Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality Part IV. How We Make Sense in Mathematics 16: On the Right Track 17: Wittgenstein and Infinity 18: Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mathematics 19: A Problem for Intuitionism: The Apparent Possibility of Performing Infinitely Many Tasks in a Finite Time 20: More on ""The Philosophical Significance of Gödel's Theorem"""
A.W. Moore is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He has held teaching and research positions at University College, Oxford, and King's College, Cambridge. He is joint editor, with Lucy O'Brien, of the journal Mind. In 2016 he wrote and presented the series A History of the Infinite on BBC Radio 4.
